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Levine’s Munich Years were essentially influenced by his involvement with the music of the 20th century. This recording shows a representative overview of American Music, with works by Gershwin, Harbison and Ives.

Real American Music

It is very difficult to answer the question
whether there really is “American music”.
There are simply too many different kinds of
such music to say. Legendary conductor Arturo
Toscanini certainly made things too easy
when he said about George Gershwin’s without
a doubt grandiose works that they are
“the only real American music.”

The beginning of any tradition of independent
American music can first said to have
developed from a sort of European-style ‘colonialism’:
through imported composers or
émigrés like Antonín Dvor¡ák and Sergei Rachmaninoff,
or globetrotters like Igor Stravinsky,
who decided to make their home in the USA
and then laid the foundation for that country’s
recent music history. But the models from
“Old Europe” paled when Charles Ives, born
in Connecticut in 1874, succeeded with an
entirely original idea.

A professional insurance salesman, Ives
showed America’s public – who looked primarily
to Europe for orientation – that his free,
searching musical language could manage
entirely without any European models or their
forms and terms. Charles Ives was an even
earlier precursor of the avant-garde than
John Cage, already using graphic notation,
chance composition, polyrhythmics, atonality,
multi-linearity, serial procedures and aleatorics
at the beginning of the 20th century. This
made him more or less the forefather of almost
all American composers of the second
half of the 20th century.

Effects Plus Depth:George Gershwin´s Cuban Overture

Composer information:
Born September 26, 1898 in New York
Died July 11, 1937 in Los Angeles

Composition:
The Cuban Overture, which Gershwin had
originally thought about titling Rumba, was
the direct result of Gershwin’s impressions
from his 1932 vacation in Havana. Premiere:
August 16, 1932 in New York

“Only one thing is important in music:
ideas plus feeling!” With this slogan,
George Gershwin put the quintessence of
his compositional style in a nutshell: “effect
plus depth”. Born in Brooklyn at the end of
the 19th century to Russian-Jewish immigrant
parents, Gershwin was animated to write his
Cuban Overture after taking a pleasure trip in
the Cuban capital of Havana in February 1932.
He was so fascinated at hearing a 16-person
rumba group that he began writing a composition
entitled Rumba even while still on vacation.
He later gave this work the more classic
title Cuban Overture.

At the time, the omnipresent sounds of exotic
percussion instruments found in popular
Cuban music (bongos, calabashes, maracas)
were part of the counterpoint of the many
tempestuous island festivals. Gershwin took
some of these instruments back with him, and
we encounter them again in his work, which
conjures up the atmosphere of lively, boisterous,
colorful Cuban festivals.

Introspection, Expressed in Sound:John Harbison´s Symphony No. 3

Composer information:
Born December 20, 1938 in Orange/New Jersey

Composition:
After his first two symphonies, written for
the Boston Symphony and San Francisco
Symphony Orchestra respectively, Harbison
composed his third piece in this genre as
a commission by the Baltimore Symphony
Orchestra to celebrate its 75th anniversary.
H completed the work in 1990 at Token Creek
Farm in southern Wisconsin, where he often
went to compose. He finished the fair copy of
the score on December 5, 1990.

Premiere:
February 26, 1991 in the Meyerhoff Hall in Baltimore
with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra,
conducted by David Zinman

Harbison himself didn’t recognize until ten
years after completing his Symphony No.
3 that the crux of the symphony is actually a
formal aspect: “The piece’s central issue is
recovering from its starting point, i.e. finding
a way to continue after starting with a
conclusion.” Harbison’s musical roots lie in jazz;
at the age of 11 he was already the pianist in
his own band. Later, he was influenced by the
works of Bach and Stravinsky. He studied in
the USA – with the “grand old men” Walter
Piston in Harvard (until 1961) and Roger Sessions
in Princeton (until 1963) – as well as for
a short time with Boris Blacher in Berlin.

Like many artists of his generation, he first
embraced the serial principle as the (supposed)
cure for traditional, national American
music à la Copland and Barber. But like
Schuller, Riegger or Foss, after going beyond
this phase he viewed serial organization as
only one means among many of shaping music.
One does find twelve-tone rows in his
oeuvre, but they may alternate quite happily
with jazz episodes, be hidden behind lyricism
or compete with episodes of tone painting. In
this respect, Harbison’s works are certainly
one of the most significant American contributions
to the “post-modern” phenomenon.
Most musical reference works, however,
place him in the corner of “New Romanticism”.

Because Harbison’s credo is to “structure
every composition differently from the others,”
his challenge when writing the Symphony
No. 3 was making the best of a difficult
beginning. Externally, this is evident from
the five sections of the compositions, which
Harbison titled with Italian designations of
feeling, rather than of tempo: „disheartened
– nostalgic – militant – passionate – exuberant.“
This is also how the conductor of the
premiere, David Zinman, spoke about the
piece’s five “moods”, which replace the traditional
sequence of movements. Harbison,
on the other hand, mentions the “stepping
stone” function that each section assumes
for the following one: each section prepares
the thematic material that is to come – as well
as a certain mood that must be overcome.

For this reason, the emotional curve of the
music rises steadily upwards from depression
to exuberance, but the thematic return
and “fatality” of the beginning – which is not
really a beginning – make sure that the Finale
is not exuberant with jubilation, but in contrast
to its designation “esuberante”, sounds
realistically restrained. “Cathartic to an extent;
but also demonic,” Harbison described
it. “The dilemma of the beginning is accepted,
but the work doesn’t find a simple, clear-cut
solution.” Even without the composer’s selfcriticism,
it is fairly obvious in the face of the
symphony’s precarious beginning why his basic
willingness to write a positive finale was
simply impossible: not because he couldn’t,
but because the musical material withstood
all attempts. How to stop? How to begin?
– Those are never solely musical questions.

Connecting Traditions:Charles Ives´ Symphony No. 2

Composer information:
Born October 20, 1874 in Danbury/New England
Died May 19, 1954 in New York

Composition:
When composing his Symphony No. 2,
Charles Ives relied on numerous older works.
This makes it difficult to cleanly trace the history
of this piece’s origin. Ives himself said
that he composed it between 1897 and 1901.
He later revised the score a number of times,
including when finishing the actual fair copy
in 1908/1909. Even shortly before the work’s
late premiere in 1951, Ives changed the ending
of the symphony one final time.

Premiere:
February 22, 1951 in New York with the New
York Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction
of Leonard Bernstein

In his essay “Music and Its Future”, Charles
Ives describes the childhood experience
which was the guiding principle of his later
compositional methods: “The composer remembers
how he once listened to a town
band as a boy. The musicians were organized
in two or three groups around the town’s main
square. The primary group stood in the pavilion
and played the main themes while the
others took these themes and varied them,
added refrains, etc., playing these from the
surrounding roofs and verandas. These echoing
voices and violins left a deep impression
on the composer.”

Charles Edward Ives, born in 1874 in a
small city in New England, took his first music
lessons from his father, an enthusiastic
musician with bold visions of new musical
possibilities, although he was no composer.
Charles received a thorough musical education,
but later emphasized that his father
taught him above all “to use his ears and
have the courage to think for himself and be
independent, in other words, not to be too
dependent on customs and mores,” as he
formulated at the beginning of his autobiographical
sketches, written during the 1930s.
Ives began composing as a student, at first
only for his father’s military band, in which
he was a drummer. After finishing school, he
attended Yale University. He wrote his Symphony
No. 1 during this period, which is still
solidly in the late romantic tradition. Several
years later, when Ives was now working fulltime
in the insurance industry, he wrote his
Symphony No. 2. It took decades, however,
before any of his symphonies was performed
publicly.

The Symphony No. 2 is a transitional
work. Whereas Ives’s Symphony No. 1 was
firmly entrenched in the formal structural
and harmonic world of the major romantic
symphonies of a Schumann or Brahms, his
second piece in this genre began displaying
independent traits, as seen by the inordinate
number of quotes and melodies reminiscent
of American folk tunes. Even though the
composition was written primarily during
1901/02, its roots reach back to 1894. Many
of its themes and motives are based on earlier
compositions. Despite these very different
sources, the symphony is formally very tightknit.
This is mainly because Ives lets motives
recur in various movements, thus closely linking
the work’s formal sections. The symphony’s
five movements have an unusual tonal
scheme in which their primary keys are not
linked by fifths, as is typically the case, but by
minor thirds.

American and European traditions lie
closely next to each other. When the composer
takes the fiddle tune Pig Town Fling and
transforms it into a passage from the Finale of
Brahms Symphony No. 1 or reshapes a motive
from the Fugue in E Minor from Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. 1 into a motive
from Camptown Races, he demonstrates how
close these two different traditions can be
– even though their roots lie in completely different
musical spheres. Ives connects these
spheres, and in doing so, develops a unique,
unmistakable musical language: America and
Europe, romantic and modern, folksong and
symphonic movement are the poles his Symphony
No. 2 traverses.